Major Data Centers Weather Tornadoes in Dallas

A series of tornadoes struck the Dallas metro area this afternoon, causing extensive damage and power outages. Early reports from Dallas-area providers suggest that there has been no major disruption in data center services in the area.

Dallas is a major data center hub, hosting at least 40 facilities for companies offering hosting services, in addition to dozens of corporate data centers.

“Dallas is a mess right now from a weather perspective, but all ops are normal,” said George Karidis, Chief Strategy Officer of SoftLayer, one of the world’s largest hosting providers. SoftLayer operates several data centers at its headquarters in North Dallas. “We had some bad wind and rain, but hopefully the worst is past.” Karidis said SoftLayer has extra operations teams on call and heading to facilities just in case.

“Currently operations are normal at all of our Texas facilities,” said Rich Miller, spokesman for Digital Realty Trust, which operates the Datacenter Park in Richardson as well as as a major carrier hotel in downtown Dallas. Miller said there had been no power outages or need to shift to backup power at Digital Realty facilities in the area.

Rackspace has experienced no utility power interruptions at its Dallas data center, which supports a big chunk of the company’s cloud hosting operations. Rackspace’s facility is in Grapevine, TX, a Dallas suburb not far from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, which had to halt all flights and check planes for hail damage.

Nirvanix said its Node 5 data center in Dallas is secure and all services remain normal and available at this time. For companies concerned about the stability of utility services in Dallas, Nirvanix is offering customers the option of shifting their data to other facilities in its network.

There are power outages throughout the Dallas area, according to ONCOR power, which just yesterday launched a new outage tracker page to provide real-time details on power problems in its coverage area.

We’re continuing to monitor the impact of today’s storms. Got updates? Please email us with news.

About the Author

Rich Miller is the founder and editor at large of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

Related Stories

Key East Coast data centers say they weathered Hurricane Irene without any loss of services to customers. In some cases, facilities were operating on generator power after utility outages, and some data centers had to plug leaks. Read More

Fast-growing IT infrastructure provider SoftLayer Technologies has leased space for a new headquarters and data center in a Digital Realty Trust (DLR) property in Dallas, the company confirmed today. Read More